Headspace - LD45 Post Mortem
Play the game: here.
Greetings, jammers!
This was my first time participating in Ludum Dare, and let's just say... it was a little hectic. I hadn't originally planned on participating, but after watching Tim Ruswick stream his development of Space Goats 2.
My participation started as a joke, running off the back of a few silly sketches of a character in his game (Jim, the space-eating monster). So I opened up Unity and started prototyping my idea to make a game from Jim's point of view. Because... well, after being accused of being the big bad guy in the story, who wouldn't develop a binge eating problem and try to devour the universe along with their space monster feelings?
So I opened up Unity and decided to blow the dust of my near non-existent C# skills and see what I could do. The only goal I had in mind was to finish. Because that's always the hardest part of making games for me. So, by the end of day one, and several mechanical prototypes down, I had a broken prototype of a Jim following the cursor in a disappearing universe as he ate his feelings away. It was super buggy, but relatively playable still... until I accidentally deleted one of the main scripts by accident because I was working at 2:00am still instead of sleeping.
So... was Headspace a 'success'?
Not exactly, but I finished. Which is a great first step. After three broken prototypes of games I thought were 'simple' by midway through day two I realized two things:
My limited C# knowledge from Uni was rusty at best.
I was getting too caught up in big ideas I didn't have the coding chops to pull off in a 72 hour jam, let alone the 15-ish hours of waking time I had to get a game done and submitted.
So, I scrapped everything and went back to basics on brainstorming a theme as though I would have for any of my other personal projects. In what direction did I want to take the theme? What are my strengths? Weaknesses? After spending 15 minutes re-framing my perspective from 'Making a game about Jim' to 'What can I do with this that I will be happy with?' and a little further brainstorming, I decided I wanted to make something small about stress or anxiety, which I had plenty of inspiration for in that last stretch with no workable game to submit. I want to really invoke a mood with the game and I knew my strengths were art and design. I knew my weakness was coding. I knew I had little to no time left to pull this goal of finishing something for submission. So I went for it and started doing some R&D on simple game mechanics I could learn from YouTube in order to pull off this state of stress and yearning for calm I was aiming to create.
What is missing? - The procedural generation is... uh... hacky? It's so random that the game isn't as skill based as I think it should be to me more fun. I think improving that would make a lot of difference.
Finish the art and add animations...
Add in a high-score to give the player something to beat on replay.
The ability for the player to press a button and choose to sacrifice some of their score to have the impending clouds retreat. I feel like with the procedural generation and this mechanic being automatic, it really destroys the balance of the game and makes it less fun to play.
I originally had a much more interesting tutorial planned that was based around the story of Tri, which would have helped convey the setting/intention a little better.
What went right? - I think my decision to scrap everything was a good one. Without it, I would have still been stuck on getting the code working on a match-three iteration of Jim's midlife crisis by the time the jam ended. Quitting isn't good, but changing your ideas isn't the same as quitting. I'm glad I remembered that.
The custom audio I made for the pickup sounds improved the theme and mood a lot. I will definitely put attention into getting custom audio into my future games.
The aesthetic of the game was partly placeholder sprites, but I made it very simple so that if I ran out of time, it would still make sense and be please to the eye and continue to add to the theme of the game. Based on player feedback so far, this was definitely accomplished.
What could I do better next time?
Set up version control!! Bug fixing was made so much more difficult by the fact I didn't bother to set up a repository for the project and use version control. I came across several moments in the earlier prototypes where I could have fixed the issue I was having if I had a previous version to roll back to (like deleting that script at 2am... ugh). Don't be lazy, do it.
Build earlier, get people to test and give feedback early. Always.
Maybe join a team? If my goal shifts from 'self improvement' to 'make a good thing that rates well', I could do a lot more with a team to make up for my weak spots. Though honestly, 'self improvement' is a really good goal, so for now... I think I'll stick with it.
It also would have helped if I had decided before the jam started that I wanted to participate :stuckouttongue: But I'm already all over that for LD 43. Bring on December!
